1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to an improved data processing system and in particular to a data storage subsystem for use with a data processing system. Still more particularly, the present invention provides a method for virtualization processes to execute in multiple locations simultaneously and to be moved from location to location thus improving system performance or ease of use.
2. Description of Related Art
Today's storage administrator is faced with many unique storage problems not prevalent a few years ago. Storage administrators in the past were typically faced with managing storage from a single host vendor. Today's storage administrator is faced with several different host platforms—multiple flavors of Unix and NT with many storage solutions attached to those hosts. Even if the administrator has selected a primary storage vendor, disk and controller technology have changed rapidly and frequently in the last few years. Three years ago, a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) controller attached to 20-megabyte SCSI with 20 2-gigabyte drives was state of the art. Today, vendors attach controllers with twice as many 36-gigabyte drives via 1-gigabit Fibre channel. The problems become “How do I manage this new storage effectively?”, “How do I protect my investment?”, and “How will I manage all of this and more in the future?”
In addition to having to deal with multiple vendors with multiple products, the administrator is faced with a myriad of management issues. With today's larger drives combined with Redundant Array of Independent (RAID) binding, the administrator is faced with partitioning very large devices to meet the storage needs of the system attached to them. A 140 GB volume is not uncommon in today's systems. Providing subsets of large storage pools becomes a problem.
In keeping with the notion of systems presenting very large volumes, how is the administrator able to divide that storage across multiple host? It also may be desirable to share the storage on a single storage device across multiple hosts.
In a site with multiple hosts and multiple storage devices, configuration software may also become an administrative issue. Each storage vendor provides tools that allow an administrator to configure device attached to a particular host. There may be as many configuration tools as there are hosts and storage systems attached to them.
In sites that have hosts and storage devices attached to a Fibre Channel loop, there is the problem of “How do I keep Host 1 from accessing and possibly restoring the data allocated to Host 2?” In this type of configuration, all of the hosts see all of the devices and believe they have access to them. An additional challenge faced by administrators is the fact that there are often many unaligned sets of users and authorization for specific users to access or change data is a concern which is a challenge exasperated by the problems discussed above.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have an improved method and apparatus for managing a storage system that protects data from being lost while providing ease of incorporation of products from various vendors.